Have, Should, Want

Posted on February 9, 2015

I feel like I have a lot of stuff that needs doing and, yesterday, I invented a system.

I made three lists:

1) Things I Have To Do
This included stuff that necessarily has to be done and can’t not be done – I need to rewrite OllyOnline’s first episode, for example (OllyOnline is the name of the show I finished writing recently).

2) Things I Feel I Should Do
This is stuff that won’t matter if it never gets done, but I feel some sort of obligation towards: clearing out my Facebook messages, sending my new music out to labels, etc.

3) Things I Want To Do
These are the things that don’t have any obligation and don’t need to happen but I’m enthusiastic about. Writing this for you is one of the things in this section.

So: you take all the tasks on your mind and you put them in one of three categories.

Sometimes a thing will belong to more than one category. For example, there’s now a Lifescouts app available that just came out for iOS. It’s really cool, so I want to tell you about it, and I also feel like I should tell you about it because a number of you will love it … but I don’t have to. So where does it go?

The way I did it was by putting the categories in order of importance: Have, Should, Want. If something is in both Have and Should, put it in Have, cos that’s more important; if it’s in Should and Want, put it in Should.

Once you’ve done all that, here’s the two-step plan for dealing with this new to-do list:

Step One – go through everything in the Have section of the list and do all that stuff first. Ignore the other sections. Just work through the Haves until they’re 100% complete.Step Two – delete the rest of the list.

It’s basically a way of figuring out what actually matters, getting done what has to be done and letting go of the rest. Trust your brain to remember the things that are important to you. You don’t need to put ‘Game Of Thrones marathon’ on a to-do list; if you want to do it, you’ll get it done.